The Rothiest Movie at Sundance

The director Alex Ross Perry brought it on himself, and I hope that he’s enjoying it. The title of his new film, “Listen Up Philip,”—which premièred at Sundance last week, seems like a giveaway. So does the typeface on the movie’s credits and, for that matter, on those of his previous feature, “The Color Wheel.” (Yes, “Portnoy’s Complaint” and company.) But the movie’s star, Jason Schwartzman, isn’t playing Philip Roth, and neither is Perry presuming to wax Rothian in the movie. Yes, it’s a riff on Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer,” a story about a young writer, Philip Lewis Friedman, who accepts an invitation to the rural home of an established (though now blocked) elder writer. No, Anne Frank isn’t hiding there under a pseudonym; in fact, Jews don’t have much to do with the movie (or, at least, their Jewishness doesn’t). Roth’s novel takes place in a few days; Perry’s movie spans more than a year. What the film does have to do with Roth is the revelation of an ambition and of a voice—which is also famously defined in “The Ghost Writer” by an elder literary mentor, E. I. Lonoff:

“Look, I told Hope this morning: Zuckerman has the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years, certainly for somebody starting out.”

“Do I?”

“I don’t mean style”—raising a finger to make the distinction. “I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head….”

In “Listen Up Philip,” the title character is about to come out with his second novel, and he’s anticipating being on the verge of a breakout. He’s facing a negative Times review but has been named one of the “35 Under 35” by a prestigious magazine. A word of admiration from an elder writer, Ike Zimmerman (played with a gruff, showy wisdom by Jonathan Pryce), is one of two rays of sunlight. The other is an invitation to go on a talking tour with a young writer of greater renown (played with unctuous glee by Keith Poulson), who cancels at the last minute—so Philip goes to see Zimmerman with no warning to his girlfriend of two years, Ashley, a photographer whose devotion he repays with egotistical indifference. (Ashley is played by Elisabeth Moss, who brings an earnest intelligence that’s all the more moving as it threatens to crack with emotion.)

The movie is another installment in a decadelong run of independent films with career-centric stories. It’s a tradition that goes back more than half a century, which arises from the practical difficulties built into the process of making films. At their best, these career-centric films serve as a prism that unpacks many strands of life—love and money, ideals and ambitions, friendship and power, fantasies and frustrations, worldly engagement and self-examination.

Perry’s new film, in the guise of a riff on several themes by Philip Roth, is a riff on what it means for a filmmaker to read Philip Roth—to want to achieve something in movies akin to what Roth has accomplished in novels. Roth’s Zuckerman novels are written in the first person, suggesting a fusion, or at least an overlap, of the voices of the author and the character. “Listen Up Philip” has an unseen narrator (the voice of Eric Bogosian); the movie begins and ends with him, and, though it doesn’t stick with his perspective, he is voluble and persistent, as much of a presence in the movie as the characters onscreen.

The Rothiness of the movie is actually fairly low. (There is a prosecutorial French woman teaching at a small New England college who seems borrowed from the pages of “The Human Stain.”) But the elaborate mode of storytelling in “Listen Up Philip” seems like an attempt to make a movie that plays at the speed of thought—that skitters from moment to moment with the density of detail and intensity of rhetorical inflection that mark Roth’s novels. It’s an attempt to borrow Rothian themes for a cinematic exercise that has nothing academic or theoretical about it, even as it suggests a third-order (or even fourth-order) relationship to the characters and the story that is itself a meta-Rothian game.

The Zuckermanesque character of Philip Lewis Friedman is plucked from the deep retrospect of “The Ghost Writer” and placed in Perry’s own youthful perspective, which, in turn, the fictionalized narrator sees from the retrospective point of view of a the far future. In other words, Perry fabricates a life that's like his own but which is crowned with a degree of success that, though he’s rightly entitled to imagine it, hasn’t quite arrived yet. It’s a big and exuberantly gaudy directorial performance that’s delivered in a modest and intimate format, and it’s greatly aided by the remarkable images of Sean Price Williams, whose darting, agile camera work, often apparently with telephoto lenses, achieves a blend of intimacy and distance, of perception and opacity reminiscent of the camerawork in the films of John Cassavetes.

In its peculiarly concrete variety of abstraction and multiple levels of narrative gamesmanship, “Listen Up Philip” disinvites the sort of discussion of character and motive that all too often takes the movie screen for a transparent view of real people. The actors’ nuanced specificity is broken up into moments and glances that seem as elusive as memories. I can’t think of a recent movie that stages with as much joy and wonder the sense of living a life that becomes, directly or obliquely, in action or in idea, the stuff of art. Not that “Listen Up Philip” is devoid of pain or bewilderment; rather, it’s devoid of guilt. That may be the Rothiest element of all.

P.S. I haven’t heard word of the movie’s forthcoming release; may this happen soon, in whatever form “release” might take in the current market.